Subject: Phase & Hearing Impairment From: Jon Boley <jdboley@xxxxxxxx> Date: Wed, 6 Oct 2010 11:17:32 -0400 List-Archive:<http://lists.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=AUDITORY>I'll start a new thread since this is somewhat tangential to the earlier question related specifically to speech & MFCCs... Anecdotally, I have seen that some people have difficulty detecting a Duifhuis (1970) pitch when one tone is out of phase with several other harmonically related tones. One person that I recently spoke with about his difficulty pointed out that he had some high frequency hearing loss, but that his thresholds were normal in the region of the out-of-phase tone. This made me wonder -- could this be related to the difficulty that Lorenzi et al (2009) pointed out... that is, that high-frequency impairment seems to be related to impaired hearing in the "normal" frequency range? Does anyone know of any research that has evaluated the ability to detect simple phase offsets in harmonic complexes in people with increased high frequency thresholds? I'm thinking that it might be interesting to see phase offset thresholds as a function of frequency... which I imagine might be correlated to the width of psychophysical tuning curves. - Jon Duifhuis, H. (1970). ‘‘Audibility of high harmonics in a periodic pulse,’’ J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 48, 888–893. Lorenzi C, Debruille L, Garnier S, Fleuriot P, Moore BC (2009) Abnormal processing of temporal fine structure in speech for frequencies where absolute thresholds are normal. J Acoust Soc Am 125:27–30